With an astounding $197 billion in net worth, French billionaire Bernard Jean Etienne Arnault surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Thursday to become the richest person in the world, according to figures from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The largest luxury goods company in the world, LVMH, which also owns Louis Vuitton, was founded by Arnault who serves as its chairman.
The achievement was made possible, who profited $1.93 billion in a single day, according to Bloomberg’s daily ranking, which is updated at the end of each New York trading day. In the meantime, Bezos—who had held the top spot since Tuesday—lost almost $755 million to move up to the second spot. At the moment, Bezos has a $196 billion net worth.
Arnault is the Chairman of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The company’s 75 fashion and cosmetics brands brought in over $83.4 billion in revenue in 2022. He is in charge of around half the empire.
The business magnate, who resides in Paris, is wed to pianist Helene Mercier and has five kids. Every one of his kids works at LVMH. Notably, the business paid an astounding $15.8 billion in 2021 to acquire American jeweler Tiffany & Co., reportedly the largest-ever acquisition of a luxury brand.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, comes in third place, behind Arnault and Bezos. Following Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, held the fourth position and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is presently ranked fifth.
Up until March 5, when Tesla shares fell after it was reported that shipments from its Shanghai facility had fallen to the lowest level in almost a year, Musk had been the market leader for more than nine months.
Zuckerberg, after making almost $2 billion in gains since the last adjustment, owned $178 billion. Significantly, Zuckerberg’s wealth dropped to $176 billion on Wednesday following global outages that day for Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta. Bill Gates has a total net worth $148 billion.
